Lackluster: The legacy of the 112th

The 112th Congress came in with a bang, but it is crawling out with the soft whimper of failure.

For two years, President Barack Obama and Congress ignored virtually every other pressing matter to engage in an ideological war over the size of government and who should foot the bill for it.

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They racked up more processes than policies: a blue-ribbon White House commission, Vice President Joe Biden’s working group, bilateral talks between Obama and Speaker John Boehner, a “supercommittee,” a “Gang of Six” that became a “Gang of Eight” and, finally, Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) coming to a deal that leaves open as many politically thorny issues as it solves.

They didn’t even hit their deadline. The Senate voted two hours past the zero mark of midnight on New Year’s morning, and House Republicans spent most of Tuesday wrangling with each other over whether and how to move forward — with a final late-night vote that passed the Senate bill on the strength of a majority of House Democrats and a minority of House Republicans. Their uncertainty was a stark reminder of how fractious the House majority has been over the past two years. After all, the bill had just passed the Senate with all but five Republicans supporting it.

The deal isn’t a pure punt: Obama got a scaled-back version of the tax hike he sought on the campaign trail, with the two sides agreeing to set $450,000 — rather than the $250,000 he wanted — as the income threshold at which tax rates would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. Republicans won by locking in the vast majority of the Bush tax cuts in a “permanent” fashion rarely seen on Capitol Hill. Moreover, they compromised on provisions that resolved for the long term the rates taxpayers will pay on capital gains, dividends, estates and alternative minimum taxes.

But the measure took two steps back for each step forward. It forestalled the “sequester” spending cuts that the president and Congress agreed to in the summer of 2011. More glaring, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the deal would add $3.9 trillion to the debt over the next decade because of lost revenue from locking in rates on individual income, estates and investment, as well as renewing tax breaks for individuals and corporations. The bargain was so chock full of goodies, including the extension of a tax cut for NASCAR track owners, that the Senate, after two years of stalemate on budget matters, gave it 89 votes.

“It’s such a sad kick-the-can-down-the-road solution. We had all hoped to do something of great magnitude and put this issue behind us,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “This is again us not living up to our responsibilities.”

Corker said he was so upset at watching “paint dry” in the Senate that he thought seriously about not seeking re-election this year “just because of the lack of productivity.”

“We’re not solving our nation’s problems. People hide from tough decisions,” he said. “So it’s been very disappointing.”